South Sudan’s borderland

Misery on the march

A refugee crisis is miserably taking shape

AID workers have started calling the waterlogged outskirts of the Jamam refugee camp in South Sudan the “lake district” after a picturesque, often wet part of north-west England. The arrival of the rainy season in Upper Nile state has turned the camp into a swamp where 30,000 people are scrambling for dry land. Half the inhabitants were to be evacuated to another camp three hours’ drive away, but the transfer was delayed after that site was partially flooded too.

Women like Arfa Hussein, who fled across the border from Sudan to the south, losing two of her children on the trek to safety, are once again on the move. The region’s black soil has become a quagmire, trapping even tractors in dark mud.

At the camp’s field hospital, run by Médecins Sans Frontières, a charity, workers dig trenches and build dykes to keep patients dry. The groundwater is dirty, and diarrhoea has begun to kill young and old at more than twice the usual rate in a health emergency. On average nine children were dying in the camp every day before the rains. A fresh count is expected to show a higher figure, with malaria cases rising too.

Jamam is one of three Upper Nile camps sheltering at least 113,000 refugees who have crossed the frequently unmarked border to escape a counter-insurgency campaign in neighbouring Blue Nile state conducted by heavily armed Sudanese government troops. The camps into which they have poured are on a vast floodplain.

The rains are expected to get worse next month, bringing even more misery. Past years’ high-water marks on trees in Jamam have not yet been reached. Doctors warn that conditions are “absolutely perfect” for a cholera outbreak. Aid workers, who have been warning since February that a humanitarian crisis is brewing, say that the UN’s refugee agency has responded too slowly. A Chinese-Malaysian oil company, Petrodar, which operates in the area and has all-weather landing strips, has also been taken to task for its reluctance to help the aid agencies.

The refugees themselves blame the Sudanese government more than UN slowness for their plight. Nazir Abode, the “sheikh of sheikhs” among community leaders in the Jamam camp, says that people were bombed out of their homes in the north. Those who refused to leave had their villages burned by the northern soldiers. Refugee columns were attacked by helicopter gunships. The government in Khartoum has denied targeting civilians and says it is battling against armed rebels.

The Blue Nile fighting is one of three simultaneous insurgencies under way in Sudan. The other two are in Darfur in the west and in Southern Kordofan’s Nuba Mountains. As fighting erupts here and there, more refugees from different parts of Sudan are on their way.